Transforming the Narrative of Life
Transforming the Narrative of Life
All the world’s a stage; And all the men and women merely players.” – William Shakespeare
Bringing “main character energy” (or MCE for the cool kids out there) is a dominant ideology in the 21st century. Stepping out of the shadows to claim your space at the center has become an ambition for a wide variety of people in contemporary culture. In a society where we have everything from impostor syndrome and fake-it-til-you-make-it methodologies to bespoke identity constructs and personal truths, being at the center of your own story has become a metamodern value for validating personal authority and realizing the life you were meant to live. While posterity might quote John Donne’s “No man is an island,” the growing reality of a self-centric experience is a great number of people trying to live as if they were the promontory point on a continent, determining what is good, true, beautiful, and valuable.
As we grapple with Western society in the 21st century, an increase in self-centered reality constructs dominates the landscape. Subjective views of reality and individualized versions of truth have become powerful tools for asserting authority over a wide range of issues. AI provides a stream of facts, opinions, and assertions unlike anything human history has ever seen. Largely, many tools of digital experience and high-tech savvy come with lightning speed but few guardrails. Validating reality is becoming harder and harder. “Why?” you may ask, because the guarantee of authenticity has long passed. The internet has been circling the drain with fact-checkers, fake news, and ubiquitous opinions for over a decade, and none of it has made the information it dispenses any more reliable. Many things we have known as truth have become a matter of choice, and circumstances that are foundational to our experience have become a basis for reinvention. It has created a complicated landscape of self-centric truths rather than reality. Illusion has become the mainstay, rather than illumination.
The burden at the doorstep is in understanding the world as it truly is. With a subjective interpretation of the world around us, we lose the moorings of values, morality, truth, and purpose. If so many are focused on the self, they turn inwards and allow the community around them to become supporting characters to their day-to-day story. What’s worse is that bringing our main character energy often results in relegating others to secondary or tertiary characters (the dreaded NPC from video game parlance) in our own personal story. If we cultivate a self-centered worldview, how do we engage the world for the better? The bottom-line answer is that we won’t.
In our social media-influenced society, the MCE world is one that speaks to personal empowerment and self-focused health, and yet, when these things translate into our real friendships, social interactions, and school/workplaces, it supports a mindset of others as less than or disagreements to be a challenge to one’s personal reality constructs. We see this sharply in identity constructs where social values differ. A distinct opinion might just contradict someone’s feelings. In a culture where subjective ideas (and relativism) dominate, differences of opinion are often elevated into ideological conflicts. In owning the narrative of our life, we end up with a thin veil of illusion that blankets the world as it truly is. The challenge is to see life as it really is and to see ourselves as part of a continent that is not bound to our elevated view of self.
The Allure of Influence
Influence is one of the most sought-after things in Western culture. When you ask many young people today what they’re looking to do with their lives, asserting influence in a particular arena regularly comes to the top of the list. When we think about life in the 21st century and the desire to make an impact, undertake meaningful work, or be part of a bigger picture in this world, influence is not just a pathway to prominence; it is social validation of main character status across a sea of “normies.”
In a culture that focuses on celebrities and self-centered perceptions of the world around them, influence becomes the chief marker of contemporary relevance. At one end, we see the influence of social media in this arena; at the other, an inner-circle/popularity dynamic driving credibility and viability in a marketing-saturated experience. The algorithm of bespoke reality elevates relevance over substance across the digital experience, as well as leaking that influence into the real world. This has only grown in recent months, as AI has outpaced search engine results as the number one source of insight and information. From boardrooms to Bible studies, people are trafficking relevance through the idea of “let’s see what AI has to say about this (or that).” Without any proof of validity, we accept machine-learned opinions and A-empowered concepts rather than develop a deeper understanding through authoritative, objective truths.
On a stage where the individual is the primary mover with a supporting cast of secondary people, that’s a dangerous recipe. When we add the marketplace of influence, entitlement, and a felt exemption from accountability (all rampant in a subjective world), we multiply the number of tyrannical individuals by 8 billion main characters walking the planet. Influence doesn’t need to see the world as it is, because its power lies in the world we assert. The postmodern effort to dismiss or invalidate authority is replaced with a metamodern value of seeing oneself as the authority. In a culture where feelings are often prioritized over facts, influence causes us to “turn in on ourselves and become a destructive force in community” (as Bonhoeffer put it). Influence and relevance become a hamster wheel of daily effort, where in order to maintain your MCE, you have to assert yourself again, and again, and again. It is a tiresome way to live, where the well will run dry.
The Danger of Narrative Living
The complication for these things, as we experience them, is that there is a growing population of people who understand their lives through the stories they tell themselves. The blur of reality is like a child watching an episodic show and modeling their personality after the main character. In a storytelling-saturated culture, we live vicariously through the impacts on others. Whether that involves sharing it to get that hit of dopamine online, or co-opting it into the story we tell at the office, on the golf course, or at the school pick-up line. We adopt a narrative form of living, replacing our experiences with organized personal storylines that shape our identity, behavior, and worldview. Of course, that comes with secondary character bios for all of our personal supporting cast as well.
Unfortunately, this isn’t just an issue for children trying to understand the changing landscape of their world and seeing characters in a show to emulate. We see this in the reinvention of self at middle age, the validation of personas amidst transition, and the embodiment of ideology, worldview, or consciousness. The convergence of MCE, influence, and narrative living conceives an illusion of self and seeks to live out of that self-deception. Looking at the Western world and seeing the division that has grown over the last 50 years, it is safe to say that deception (and particularly self-deception) has been at the helm of this movement.
This is why illusion is so rampant, and people cannot see the world as it truly is. They would rather speak their truth than be subject to objective reality. They would rather assign a narrative of circumstance, personality, or influence over living out a worldview informed by an authority outside their own. The desire to emphasize nuance, semantics, and relevance has made us a mile wide and an inch deep. Not so much a culture of a jack of all trades, but rather embodying a generation of people who are “chattering about everything, but pausing to learn the true value of nothing” (as A.W. Tozer asserted).
Be Transformed
So what are we to do in a world steeped in these values? Where do we find value? How can we find a truth that sets us free, rather than entrenches our illusion? To begin with, recognize that we are not the main character of our existence. What we are really looking for is a higher purpose, not an elevation of self over others. When we view the world, we need to see it as it truly is, rather than a summation of our collective perspectives or personal truths. Our lives were not meant to be lived chiefly for self, and the continuum of human history lends considerable credibility to that reality. We must be transformed, renewed in our mind and our spirit, and then live out of that state to transform others, rather than to validate self, curry influence, or assert our relevance.
In a culture that is trying to conform the masses to the illusion it professes, the only way to see the world as it truly is is to be transformed. Many people go through life believing they are the main character in their story. Jesus’s example shows that we love God by loving and serving others, teaching us that we are not the central focus of our lives. God is the main character. He has created a host of humanity and heaven, as well as a world full of His good creation, that serve His purpose and seek to understand their world according to His truth, beauty, and goodness. When we look to understand what is right and wrong in the world, we must look to the Creator and heed His instruction, rather than forging our own ideas to live by.
The world as it truly is comes from the one who created it. His goal for us was not to be the main characters of our own story, but to see his centrality in the hearts of people that He made in His image. He knows each one of us more intimately than we can know ourselves. His plan was not for us to assert our own will, understanding, or dominance in this world to shape it according to the good of our own purpose. His plan was for us to be in community with Him, experience the good of His purpose, and live a transformed life, transformed people cultivating transformation in the world. If you are interested in understanding what it looks like to live a transformed life, click here.
So many people are living in the illusion of self and trying to bring their main character energy to life, but only end up tired, lonely, and confused as they navigate the 21st century. Rather than managing the narrative of their life, we need to transform it. We can never manufacture enough main-character energy to give ourselves the higher purpose we are. looking for. But there is hope; we can seek the Lord while He may be found. Make Him the main character of your life, and He will give you a well of strength, power, and purpose that will never end.
